 Good morning, everyone. My name is Ariel Tortarolo. I work at the World Bank, and this is joint work with Juliana Londoño-Velez. And well, thank you for including my paper in the program. So as Nils just showed, off-choir evasion remains an important challenge for tax policy. And it's not that we haven't done nothing about it, right? There is a growing research documenting these facts, like in South Africa. And in particular, the policy arena has been quite active. For example, over 50 countries have implemented tax amnesties very recently with the goal of enticing wealthy evaders to come forward and disclose hidden foreign income and assets in exchange for reduced penalties and no prosecution. And more recently, many countries or governments worldwide have implemented enforcement difference, enforcement initiatives like the CRS, FATCA, and many tax information exchange agreements. So understanding the circumstances under which these policies work or not is kind of crucial for tax enforcement and the conduct of tax policy. But it has been hard to draw lessons from the country's burning experiences. For many reasons, first of all, base renovation rates are quite different across countries. When you look at the law, the design of tax amnesties are very different across countries. And the contextual features as well within countries. And there are also data limitations. So it's hard to access these confidential records. But we have made a lot of progress in the last couple of years. So what we do in this paper is we study the case of Argentina with offshore tax enforcement initiatives. And we think Argentina is well suited to examine these issues for many reasons. First of all, there is a lot at stake. So about a third, this is a figure we borrowed from Annette and Neil Paper and Gabrielle Paper, where we show that by 2007, a third of the GDP was owned in offshore. The equivalent of a third of GDP was owned in offshore wealth by Argentinians. And the other good thing about Argentina is that since 1991, we have a wealth tax. And because of that, people report annually their foreign and domestic wealth in their tax returns. Perhaps the third point, more importantly, is that we have a lot of experience with tax amnesties or voluntary disclosure programs. So in a period of seven years, there were three amnesties, one in 2009, another one in 2013, 2015, which were not very successful at all. And then six months after the one in 2015 ended, we had one that was very successful where people disclosed actually the equivalent of 21% of GDP in hidden assets. So that's what we do in the paper. So let me show you this motivating figure with official data from the tax administration. Here we are breaking this 21% of GDP in different type of assets. And what is important is that a quarter of a million of Argentines participate in these amnesties. So this is a lot of people, and usually in the top 2% of the distribution. So 80% was hidden abroad. It was mostly financial assets. So you can see that 10% of GDP was in foreign stocks and investments. But also you can see very interesting how we come back to this at the end. Many people disclosed real estate, even though this is not covered by CRS, right? So this is very interesting fact. And there was a special tax, so I won't have time to explain the details of the amnesty. I will come back to this at the end. But there was a special tax that they have to pay if they decided to participate in the amnesty. It was 10%, roughly 10% of what they disclosed. And because of that, the government collected 1.8% of GDP from this one-time tax. So again, a lot of this was like $10 billion, and like equivalent of a month of BAT revenue. So these assets were hidden in these countries. You can see the flags, like most of the assets were hidden in the US, Switzerland, and the British Virgin Islands. And then for real estate in Uruguay, the US and Brazil. And for a bank account, also the US, Switzerland, and Uruguay. So Uruguay is like our tax haven in Latin America. So what we do in the paper is we, this extensive scale of disclosures, we take advantage of this, and we use straightforward methods to kind of unpack the effect of changes in tax enforcement in these last two decades. So we use tax tabulations that are publicly available in the IRS web page, very detailed, and then parrot interpolations to kind of show some evidence. So the last thing we do is in the paper, we discuss several factors that may have contributed to the 2016 amnesty success. And I will try to make sure when he showed me that I have five minutes to rush to that part, because I think it's important for this audience to know about it. So we contribute to a growing body of research. Why do we think Argentina is interesting? I already mentioned three facts. But I think it provides one of the largest natural experiments with amnesties. I think that by comparing these three amnesties to that failed, and then one that was successful, we can learn what might work and what might not work. And I think it's also optimistic in the sense that we show that large disclosures of offshore wealth and assets can take place even in a country, a developing country that had a history of a lot of assets hidden offshore, failed amnesties. But now we have one that was actually very successful. So let me start by showing you some figures. I will go very fast in these parts so that I can reach the last bullet over there what made the 2016 amnesty different. So let me start by showing what people did in this case. So these are two time series of the number of tax returns reporting assets located in Argentina and located offshore. And you can see that in the first amnesty 2009 and 2013, 2015 is actually very flat. And then we see this massive increase in tax returns reporting assets offshore. So this coincides with the amnesty and some other factors, but it's mostly because of that. And you can see that after that is very stable in the next four years. And we will add an extra data point very soon in October. So this is a 310% increase in the number of people disclosing offshore foreign assets. Because of this, when we look at the values, the amount of assets in constant, this is in constant pesos of 2015, so adjusted for inflation, we can see that today large Antinians report that roughly half of their wealth is located offshore. And it's interesting, this means that they were previously evading taxes back in time for a very long period of time. The ratio is like 20% and 80% roughly. As Niels also has showed and many papers have shown so far, these disclosures are typically highly concentrated at the top. So what we do in this figure is we, again, normalize everything to 2015, but what we do is we decompose the top 2% of assets by increasing beans of wealth. And when we look at that, we can see that this disclosure actually expanded the amount of wealth reported by the top 0.5%, especially the top 0.1%. And because of this, when we look at the scale, normalize to 120 in 2015, but when we look at the values, this means that individuals today report two to three times as many assets as before the program in 2016. Fiscal externalities. So we show that the massive disclosures expanded the Argentinian wealth tax base. So you can see, again, before the 2016 amnesty, this kind of oscillates around zero. But after that, we can see that the wealth tax base actually doubles. And because of that, the wealth tax revenue also doubled since 2016. So I think Argentina is one of the countries with the highest wealth tax revenue in the world. I think it's close to 1% of the GDP annually. But even more striking, and I think this has been also documented, for example, in Colombia, is that once you disclose an asset in the following year, you have to disclose the returns of that asset. So that means that you can also collect revenue from other sources, like the personal income tax. And actually, using these simple time series, we can see that the number of people reporting in the personal income tax return, reporting capital income, these number of taxpayers increases substantially. It actually doubles before and after the 2016 amnesty. And also the capital income tax base compared to the other bases, which is this figure over here. So the four sources of income, you can see that the one that is increasing substantially is the one for capital income. We don't have capital income. We cannot disentangle the amount of revenue coming from capital income from these series. But this means that they are collecting more revenue from this source. How am I doing in terms of time? How much time do I have? More than five. So this one is also interesting. Do taxpayers repatriate? So I mentioned at the beginning that Argentinians disclose the equivalent of 21% of GDP in hidden assets. That doesn't mean that they brought it back to Argentina. It wasn't required to bring it back. So they only had to participate and say, OK, I have this bank account in the US and this bank account in Switzerland, and so on. But there were some incentives to repatriate. So some countries, especially those that don't have a wealth tax when they implement an amnesty is because they are aiming for people to bring the capital back to the country and to have a more productive use. But that, so what we show in the paper is that typically those incentives don't work very well because there are many different reasons why they put their wealth offshore. So in the paper, we have a discussion that there are some clauses in the amnesty. For example, if you bring the capital back to the country, you wave the penalty that you have to pay. It's 10%. And even in that case, people decided to keep their wealth offshore in other countries. So we argue that perhaps taxation is not the private motive why people hold assets abroad to begin with. And I think especially developing countries, there might be different reasons. We cannot pin down exactly which one, but we believe it's probably economic volatility, currency controls, inflation, and so on. Or it could be that they want to obtain higher returns. So let me go to this last section of the paper where we discuss the features of the different amnesties. I think what is important here is that in terms of the carots and sticks is that when you participate in the amnesty, they forgave you all the tax liabilities that you owed backwards, no criminal prosecution. And this means in the past you would have to pay 2% to 10 times the taxes that you had evaded. So there were some incentives there. And then in terms of the cost, I already mentioned this, but there was a 10% special tax that you had to pay one time. But it was 0% if you had assets below $50,000. So let me go to what we think could explain this miracle somehow. So the first one is that the amnesty rewarded compliant taxpayers to safe keep the tax morale, but it also slashed the wealth tax to entice participation. So let me show you the wealth tax schedule over time. And in particular, to focus on this period over here. So this is when the amnesty took place. The government decreased, so went from notches and from four brackets to one bracket and decreased the tax rate substantially. And they were actually promising taxpayers to eliminate the wealth tax by 2019. So it was an important incentive, promising wealth taxpayers, OK, if you disclose your wealth, don't worry because you won't have to pay wealth tax anyway. And the second factor is that the threat of detection became more credible. So there were many tax information exchange agreements that made the threat of detection more credible at this period of time. So you can see that in 2016, in these months, Argentina signed many agreements with this country. This is actually a slide that I borrowed from the IRS, an IRS presentation. This is information that the IRS was actually showing the wealth taxpayers. It is interesting that this factor cannot explain all the success of the amnesty. I put a note here because the IRS was not fully operational until 2018, but also because people also disclose domestic assets in real estate, which is domestic assets, which are not part of the IRS. The third component is that I think you need a favorable political economy in general for this to be kind of successful. In this case, there was a pro-market and business-friendly government. And I think they were also kind of smart when they wrote the law by earmarking revenue to fund public pension systems. So when you read the law, the first chapter of the law is we are going to fix the pension system. And the second chapter is we are going to fund this with a tax amnesty. So then it was easier to pass in Congress. I think they were smart in that sense. And this is, for example, to show you how the political economy, people, when Macri took office in 2016, there is a champion as an index that people follow in Argentina. It's like a trust index. And there was a lot of trust in the government. And lastly, let me see this is not publicizing the pension system that they were going to do with the tax revenue from the amnesty. But the last point that I think it's important, it's not extremely important, but I think it matters, is the salience of the amnesty and the communication of the IRS with taxpayers. So I think this is a photo of the main entrance of the IRS in Buenos Aires. And you can see that there were huge banners here saying, disclose your assets, your hidden assets. You pay 10% if you disclose it before December 31. And then it's going to increase to 15% if you do it after one. And you would see this is a very important street in Buenos Aires. Then when you look at Google search trends, you can see that compared to the previous two amnesties, there was much more interest in 2016. And as a benchmark, I'm showing that the peak in COVID, people learning how to do their pizza. So it was even more important than that. This is an advertisement from the IRS where they were describing the taxpayers penalty trade-off, zero. So you can see on the left, they are saying that there is a 5% penalty if you disclose it. But if you don't and you get caught, you will have to pay this amount. So you have to liquidate the asset and get more money to pay for this. The process was very simple. I think something that Danette likes is that there is a countdown here on the IRS web page where they show how many days you have to participate in the amnesty. So I'm out of time, so let me conclude. What we show in the paper is that large disclosures of your assets can take place, even in a country like Argentina that had a lot of stake and a history of failed amnesties. I think a question that you might have in mind is whether this would be applied to other countries or even a future Argentina. We don't know the answer to that. We have unique features, but we do think that we can learn some. We know more than before, right? And I think we know a little bit more than what might work and what might not. And here are the factors that I just mentioned. And I show you funny pictures about. So thank you very much and happy to take questions after this. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you.